A Film by Margarethe von Trotta
A political biography of one of the leading figures in the history of the Left
Friday, January 30th, 2009
6:30pm
295 Lafayette st. 4th FL New York, NY 10012
All Posts Tagged With: "politics"
Platypus NYC screening: Rosa Luxemburg (1986)
Platypus NYC screening: The Handsmaid’s Tale (1990)
Friday, January 23rd, 2009
6:30pm
New York University Sociology Department
Puck Building
295 Lafayette st. 4th FL
New York, NY 10012
Progress or Regress? The Future of the Left under Obama (December 6, 2008)
The Platypus Affiliated Society in New York organized a moderated panel discussion and audience Q&A to critically evaluate the widespread assumption that the election of Barack Obama presents an opportunity for today’s Leftists. Asking how opportunity can be distinguished from opportunism, Platypus invited several intellectuals and activists to publicly think through the foreseeable pitfalls and [...]
December 7th, 2008 | admin | 4 comments | Continued
Obama and Clinton: “Third Way” politics and the “Left”
Chris Cutrone For the “Left” that is critical of him, the most common comparison made of Obama is to Bill Clinton. This critique of Obama, as of Clinton, denounces his “Centrism,” the trajectory he appears to continue from the “new” Democratic Party of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) expressed by Clinton and Gore’s election in [...]
December 1st, 2008 | Platypus Review editor | 1 comment | Continued
Red-baiting and ideology: the new SDS
To the editors of the Platypus Review: I am not now, nor have I ever been, either a Maoist or sympathetic to Maoism. I am also not a member of SDS. I was outraged however, by the blatant red-baiting of Rachel Haut in a recent Platypus Review Interview and disturbed that it seems to have [...]
December 1st, 2008 | Platypus Review editor | 0 comments | Continued
Five questions to the student Left
Pam C Nogales, Benjamin Shepard An interview with SDS member Rachel Haut published in the September issue of this publication provoked widespread comment in radical circles. (1) We welcome the discussion but worry that it remains ensconced within the sterile jargon and petty antinomies of the actually-existing- Left. More fundamental questions exist than, say, the [...]
October 1st, 2008 | Platypus Review editor | 0 comments | Continued
Capital in history: The need for a Marxian philosophy of history of the Left
Chris Cutrone [Español] [Ελληνικό] [Deutsch] [The following is a talk given at the Marxist-Humanist Committee public forum on The Crisis in Marxist Thought, hosted by the Platypus Affiliated Society in Chicago on Friday, July 25, 2008.] I want to speak about the meaning of history for any purportedly Marxian Left. We in Platypus focus on [...]
October 1st, 2008 | Platypus Review editor | 7 comments | Continued
Iraq and the election: The fog of “anti-war” politics
Chris Cutrone Barack Obama had, until recently, made his campaign for President of the United States a referendum on the invasion and occupation of Iraq. In the Democratic Party primaries, Obama attacked Hillary Clinton for her vote in favor of the invasion. Among Republican contenders, John McCain went out of his way to appear as [...]
October 1st, 2008 | Platypus Review editor | 2 comments | Continued
Ba’athism and the history of the Left in Iraq: Violence and politics
Ian Morrison Since the 1960s the saturation of brutality and violence in Iraq has caused considerable confusion among Leftists in regards to both its political meaning and causes. One cannot fully understand the character of Saddam Hussein’s Arab Ba’ath Socialist Party without taking into account that it achieved political power by systematically killing off the [...]
March 1st, 2008 | Platypus Review editor | 2 comments | Continued
Interview: Ernesto Laclau
Ernesto Laclau, Ashleigh Campi Confronting the confusion and fragmentation that wrought progressive politics in recent decades, Ernesto Laclau’s work attempts to theorize the path to the construction of a radical democratic politics. Drawing on Gramsci’s concept of hegemony to devise his own theory by that name, Laclau describes the processes of social articulation that creates [...]
December 1st, 2007 | Platypus Review editor | 0 comments | Continued